The Secret Adventurer's Club (Part 8)

The next two rooms proved to be drearily similar to the first. Even more so in one case when Finny’s searching fingers found an over full pisspot. She dried her hand on the far from clean sheet and retreated to the balcony, leaving Casper to finish digging through the room’s contents.

Across the expanse of the Saloon, Onetooth and Worms seemed to have paused their treasure hunting to engage in a sword fight with two brightly coloured things they had found in one of their rooms. They were really going at it too, and a smiling Finny watched them bonking each other around the head with the obviously pretty soft ‘swords’. It looked like fun, certainly more fun than dipping your hand in someone’s wee.

Casper soon joined her. He had obviously found a lot more of the girl-pad-things because his shirt was now fairly bulging with them and even sticking up through the neck hole. Feeling less than optimistic at their luck so far, Finny and Casper made for the next door.

The door opened on a scene of total devastation. But this room was, or rather had been, something far grander than the first three. For a start there were no shabby bunk beds. Only one large bed occupied the room. Finny figured you could get eight kids sleeping in it easily and still have room to roll over. There was what had once been nice furniture too and what looked like expensive, if rather flamboyant, clothes were scattered across the floor. But Finny and Casper didn’t go any further than the doorway.

Whoever slept in this room must really have liked to look at themselves, was Finny’s conclusion. There were a few unbroken mirror tiles left on the walls and ceiling, but most of them had been smashed and now lay in dagger-like shards all over the bed, the clothes and pretty much everything. No way are we going digging around in there, Finny thought, holding onto Casper’s arm just in case. She closed the door.

“Let’s do the next one.”

The next room was just as trashed as the mirror room, only without the foot long, razor sharp invitations to bloody death covering everything in sight. Like the previous room it had only one enormous bed and nice furniture. Also like the other room there were lots of shiny, sparkly and not very warm clothes scattered everywhere. Obviously whoever had got there before them had taken all the proper clothes, was Finny’s assessment. These clothes were just like what Onetooth and Worms had been collecting. Finny held one or two items up for closer inspection. It dawned on her that what she had seen so far looked suspiciously like the clothes her older self and the other girls had been wearing in her Kidsmass eve dream. The thought made her feel strangely uncomfortable so she stopped looking through the discarded clothing and, as Casper was already lifting the mattress, went to the neat little dressing table and lifted it back onto its legs, well, the three that remained anyway.

When she had finished going through the drawers, Finny’s haul was; several items of tradeable makeup, a box of foil-wrapped posh balloons (she had to open one and blow it up to work out what they were) and, taped to the bottom of the drawer, (another piece of Joe advice) a really good dagger.

And so it continued. Finny had dissuaded Casper from doing like Onetooth and Worms and collecting clothes. Between the two of them they had already amassed a great pile of fancy clothing. Anymore, she realised, would just create what Joe called a ‘glut in the market’ and they likely wouldn’t be able to sell most of it. Instead, she and Casper had concentrated on makeup, pads and knick-knacks… Oh and a growing collection of the posh balloons.

Finny planned on taking those to Maisie because the occasional parties held at the orphanage always seemed to be short of balloons. Of course there would be the usual question; ‘where did you get them from?’ To which the usual answer ‘found ‘em scavenging’ normally sufficed. It was always a risk, though, guessing what you could and couldn’t get away with but Finny wasn’t stupid enough to take anything to the staff that would get her into too much trouble.

She and Casper had also come across the same sword things Onetooth and Worms had been fighting with. Finny doubted they were toy swords though. Swords didn’t buzz for one thing. She got a vague feeling, too, that they were probably something medical, and therefore probably icky. In the end she decided to leave them and would make sure the others did too. If they were medical she didn’t want to catch anything from them.

And so she and Casper and Onetooth and Worms eventually met about in the middle of the third balcony. Between them they had made quite a haul of goodies, and, combined with the food in the Kitchen, it was going to be hard work getting it all through the streets.